Sea Hawk Infinite Battleship
"Life and death are mine to dispense. What is that if not the power of a god?" :- Captain Wu Shengli Tactical Analysis * Scorch the Land: The Sea Hawk Infinite Battleship is the most heavily armed ship in the Chinese wet navy, armed with a chroniton torpedo launcher for long range engagements and shore bombardment. * Boil the Sea: At close range, the Sea Hawk's polaron cannons are no less devastating, and will quickly reduce anything afloat to a radioactive hulk. * On Burning Seas: Just as much attention was given to the Sea Hawk's defences as its weapons, and while it takes a considerable amount of power to start the plasma accretion process, a powered Sea Hawk can withstand harrowing amounts of damage. * Warp Core Breach: Should the plasma accretion core be breached, however, the word "meltdown" ceases to be adequate as the Sea Hawk consumes itself in a radioactive cataclysm. Zhanjiang Hydrodock, Commander's Log 493 The engineers say they have a plasma accretion device ready for installation. They're very enthusiastic about it, but I am not. The process is difficult to initiate and difficult to sustain. While it does generate awesome amounts of power, it is also even more unstable than our standard atomic reactors... no mean qualification. Worse, it takes a significant jolt from an exterior power source to initiate and sustain the process, and while a plasma accretion device can provide tremendous power - a net gain, in fact - transmitting the power is another matter entirely. An electroplasma system, the engineers call it. EPS. Snaking conduits out of the accretion core serve as channels for the electroplasma, bringing tremendous amounts of energy everywhere they touch. But the system is delicate. Nudge it too much and you'll get microbreaches in the conduits that will handily fry anything small they power - like a bridge officer's console - and the person working at that console. This is a serious safety concern. Nevertheless, I have been charged with creating a sea vessel worthy of this device. One thing is certain: no mere disruptors or conventional ray cannons will be employed. Their power drain is not significant enough to warrant a core of this magnitude, and neither is their destructive capability. Polarons, however, are an intriguing opportunity. We've never before attempted to use polaron-based weapons in any serious capacity due to their exorbitant power drain, but mounted on a ship with a plasma accretion core... the scientists are very interested in the possibility. Directed polarons have strange interactions with shields and normal power generators - they could potentially pierce shields as though they didn't exist, and somehow dampen energy systems. It's only conjecture at this point whether polaron weapons could be developed into shield-piercing or energy-dampening weapons in the future. As I noted, they've never been seriously used before. Perhaps it's time to start experimenting. While we're at this kind of experimental insanity, perhaps it's time to test chroniton weapons as well. They're a very peculiar form of particle we only know about from testing the plasma accretion process with Jade - they have most unusual properties, and some of our scientists suspect that chroniton particles don't entirely exist in our time stream. Generating them more-or-less requires a plasma accretion core, but we might be able to find a use for chroniton-based weapons. When I suggested this to the base's head scientist, he hypothesized that we could somehow inject chronitons into a torpedo casing using a burst of electroplasma, then fire the torpedo. By all rights it should be highly unstable and short-ranged, but courtesy of the odd properties of chronitons, such a weapon might not decay rapidly as we perceive time, effectively granting such a weapon great range. And why not finish the insanity with some covariant shields, hmmm? Big power draw, but significantly more durable than standard shield systems. It takes a certain size shield generator to create them, though, so only a big ship could pull it off. Well, this experimental monstrosity should qualify. The plasma accretion core itself is roughly the size of a torpedo ship. And there will be the small matter that, should the accretion core ever be breached... well, let's just say it's been two weeks since the second prototype exploded and I'm still finding holes melted through the deckplates. And the prototype was being tested in a separate complex entirely. As it stands, project approved. Tentative name: '''Sea Hawk Infinite Battleship'. Has a nice ring to it, I think.'' Category:Units